Path to Purchase Journey – Digital Marketing Spend Considerations

Wed, 22/05/2013 - 14:39

Anyone who has spent sufficient time studying Google Analytics data will tell you that in the correct hands it can provide great insight into your digital customer interactions and in the wrong hands can cause you to make rash and unqualified marketing decisions. To think that most of your customers visit your site for the first time and immediately convert into the desired customer behaviour is naïve because, as with the traditional marketing mix, multiple touch points are often required in the digital mix to drive the potential customer from the awareness phase through to the act of converting. To fill this data niche, Google is showcasing the effect of the components of the digital marketing mix with the new Customer Journey to Online Purchase data set recently published.

The interactive report highlights the insight provided by collected data through the Google Analytics multi-funnel reports, attribution modelling and e-commerce sections. Using the shared data from over 36,000 analytics clients who enabled data sharing, the report explains the two major facets of the customer purchase behaviour: Which elements of digital marketing act as influences vs converters and how long the average sales cycle is in a 30 day window.

Different Industry, Different Behaviours

Most of us need to evaluate our purchasing decision more critically depending on the type of product, usually with cost of investment at the forefront. Therefore different industries have different journeys and number of steps for the eventual conversation of a sale. As a business, your goal is to streamline the process by utilising the optimal influencers for awareness and focusing on the end converters to drive sales. While conversion points are the last touch base of a client, much like a football team spending their entire budget on strikers without a playmaker in midfield, you’re not going to come out on top. Google’s report gives the broad strokes of various industries and suggested paths, highlighting the power that each element varies for each consumer.

customer journey to purchase

What Does This Mean for My Business?

The report highlights the need for analysis of your marketing funnel and what elements of the mix you may be using incorrectly or, in some cases, not at all. Perhaps you, and your digital marketing partner, are not spending your campaign budget in the right areas and possibly miscalculating the customer behaviour. Discovering that a lot of product awareness in your industry is generated through email and you aren’t running a campaign may indicate a starting point to a brand new digital campaign in the making. Testing new ideas and benchmarking these for your audience and comparing them to previous mixes can mean more frequent conversions from digital activities. Similarly, knowing that a majority of your audience converts on average 20 days after seeing a display advert, and yours are failing to cause conversions, may mean that you are sending the wrong message or that other elements of the mix aren’t working. As with any data set, correlation is necessary from multiple sets of data to avoid taking actions on anecdotal information.

Understanding how, and why, customers are buying your products is crucial to driving your business forward. You, and your marketing partner, need to find the winning conversion path for both you and your clients to have mutually beneficial digital transactions.

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